Arca

Translating to ‘skin’ in English, its urgent, high-pitched signal follows the melancholy first-take of the artist’s vocal, who’s sung before but never with such vulnerability. It marks the start of a soaring new direction.

Even the wordless tracks on Arca are among the producer’s most powerful vignettes.

As always, Ghersi pushes his boundaries on Arca, and the vulnerability he displays makes it some of his most exciting and moving music yet.

This intensely personal touch humanises his alien sound design, casting him as a kind of sensual mutant whose comradeship with Bjork makes perfect sense. [Jun 2017, p.23]

Arca suggests a sort of shift that is so well-defined, confident, significant, and grounded in the artist’s own past aesthetics that it capably reconstitutes its onlookers’ iconic definition of the artist.

The anguished sentiments of the songs resonate whether you understand Spanish or not, with the celestial tones of the tracks serving as an illuminating pathway to either heaven or hell.

There are echoes of other singular vocal talents such as Jonsi and Anonhi, but Ghersi here occupies a sonic multiverse of his own creation. [Jun 2017, p.102]

Arca likewise refuses to ossify into a legible and easily recognizable shape, defying our expectations of the artist’s output while remaining untethered even to a clearly delineated internal logic. All of this evasion paradoxically pays off, and the resulting album is both emotionally enrapturing and conceptually thrilling.

Words make Arca’s tense, sad hyper-modernity a little more accessible, if no less strange.

If the skittering fluctuation of Ghersi’s past releases gained him a cult following, then the open-hearted ballads sprinkled throughout Arca should earn him his well-deserved breakthrough.

Arca's most accomplished work to date.

Peeling back the density and obtuseness of Xen and Mutant, Arca is his most engaging, emotionally draining and confrontational album to date.

Exquisite opener Piel captures the interplay between poise and prostration that has made Catholic ritual such a rich artistic seam, while arch humour is provided by Whip--hyper-real lashing accompanied by the sound of a powering-down robot--and Desafío, which takes disposable Eurotrash pop and makes it worthy of pious contemplation.

Arca rides a steady stream of minimalist melancholia, juxtaposed against Ghersi’s intense, operatic vocals--the effect is one of ceremonial transcendence.

It’s beautiful. The second half of the album, as mentioned earlier, is less interesting.

It’s a challenging but rewarding listen which uncovers itself most rewardingly when given full attention on a dark and melancholic night.

By peeling back the layers of his persona, Ghersi breaks himself down in an attempt to find rebirth, trying to reconcile with his past and present. The result is his most daring and enthralling record yet.

This back-and-forth is carried along throughout Arca, demonstrating that Ghersi hasn't lost his fondness for tempered electronic cacophony (see "Castration" and "Whip"), but has expanded his palette, to mind-bendingly gorgeous results.